In a world where much of mid-budget Hollywood cinema comes in a cacophony of sludgy greys and browns, Boots Riley is a glorious peacock. His films seem almost indecently alive. He plays with the frame like a child prodigy, acutely aware of the possibilities of lenses, angles and composition. He has yet to have the imagination and joy squashed out of him by life.
That exuberance is particularly well suited to I Love Boosters, a riotous anti-capitalist caper about the Velvet Gang, a trio of professional shoplifters who steal designer clothes to sell cheaply to those whose sartorial ambitions extend beyond their wallets. Their turquoise-loving ringleader, Corvette (Keke Palmer), has ambitions of becoming a designer herself, even as she targets mathematician turned fashion mogul Christie Smith (Demi Moore), whose business model offers Riley a suitably grotesque microcosm of capitalism: exploitation dressed up and sold back to you with a mark-up.
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What begins with the gang liberating armfuls of luxury goods soon expands into a considerably stranger battle between Corvette and Christie, as Riley sends his thieves deeper into the machinery of the fashion industry. Corvette’s desire to destroy Christie becomes increasingly tangled up with her need for access to the world Christie controls, and a simple rich-versus-poor equation is muddied by the fact that the people dismantling the system are not immune to wanting what it promises.
Naturally, the clothes are fabulous. Costume designer Shirley Kurata meets Riley’s cartoonish, lightly surreal aesthetic with glorious excess, creating a world of screaming colour and maximalist silhouettes straight out of a fashionable fever dream. There is something particularly delicious in Riley filling his fashion-world fantasia with stars accustomed to scaling the Met Gala steps in couture, then dressing them as though the invitation had stipulated “Eat the Rich Avant-Garde” and everyone had actually bothered to stay on theme.
Riley has an equally good eye for the people inside the clothes. Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige join Palmer in the Velvet Gang, while LaKeith Stanfield, Don Cheadle and Moore populate an ensemble that understands precisely the frequency Riley is on. Plus, the writer/director’s politics are no more muted than his colour palette. He has little interest in subtext and I Love Boosters is so heavily seasoned with jokes, arguments, visual gags and outright political instruction that occasionally it becomes difficult to absorb any one of them before the next arrives. The film’s singularity means it marches to the beat of its own drum, but there will inevitably be viewers who find themselves unable to dance to it.
Still, in an increasingly risk-averse cinematic landscape, there is something beautiful about encountering an artist so uncompromising in both style and substance. Riley may not always know quite when to stop, and remains considerably better at soaring into the stratosphere than landing the plane. But when so much cinema seems frightened even to leave the runway, it’s hard to begrudge him the altitude.